New Needs for Retirement Complexes' Oldest

By SARA RIMER

Published: March 23, 1998

Correction Appended

DELRAY BEACH, Fla.—
When Herman and Annette Adelson moved to the Kings Point retirement community 20 years ago, they were happy to pay extra for a condominium on the second floor. The upstairs apartments offered breezes, better views of the golf course and, important to transplanted Northerners, fewer bugs.

There were no elevators, but who needed elevators? ''We used to run up the stairs two at a time,'' recalled Mr. Adelson, a retired pharmacist from Newton, Mass. ''We didn't even think about them.''

But that was another life, when the Adelsons were in their 60's. Today those same stairs -- one flight, 14 concrete steps -- loom as an insurmountable obstacle. Now Mrs. Adelson, who is 83, has severe rheumatoid arthritis. She can negotiate the stairs only painfully, going down backward, with the help of her 85-year-old husband. And she does so only once a week.

Kings Point was on the retirement frontier 25 years ago when its rows of budget-priced concrete condominiums arose out of the swamp and beanfields here, seven miles from the ocean. Like other condo complexes sprouting across South Florida at the time, it offered the ''active retirement life style'' to eager Northern transplants in their 50's and 60's who were attracted by the golf, the swimming pools, the huge clubhouse with classes ranging from pottery to Yiddish storytelling.

Now Kings Point is on a new frontier, struggling to reinvent itself to accommodate its growing numbers of aging retirees, doing everything from making home health care available to turning up the lights in the bingo hall. Like many first-generation retirement communities across the Sun Belt, it is faced with growing ranks of what gerontologists call the ''oldest old,'' those 85 and over, the fastest-growing segment of the population by percentage.

A quarter of a century ago, no one expected vast numbers of people to live well into their 80's and 90's; those who did, the thinking went, would eventually move back North, to be near their children.

But today 40 percent of Kings Points's 13,000 residents are 80 or older; the average age is 73. Nationally, the ''oldest old'' category has grown six times faster than the population as a whole since 1960. The Census Bureau projects that by 2000, 1 in 8 elders, or about 12 percent, will be 85 or over, up from 5.6 percent in 1960. And by 2030 there are expected to be close to 9 million people over 85, about two-and-a-half times the current number.

''We've never had a society this old,'' said Raymond T. Coward, the former head of the gerontology center at the University of Florida, who has visited Kings Point. ''The Adelsons are a metaphor for all of us. We will all probably end up starting out in retirement relatively healthy, with discretionary resources. But as our life changes, our circumstances change.''

As lives change, even the most mundane things become an issue. Like the lack of elevators, which has become a problem in retirement communities across Florida.

E. Bentley Lipscomb, secretary of the Florida Department of Elder Affairs, said he got a call recently from a South Florida county official. ''He said, 'We've got all these third-story apartments without elevators,' '' Mr. Lipscomb recalled. '' 'How do we apply for money for elevators?' ''

''Well,'' Mr. Lipscomb said, ''there is no money for elevators. What do you do? Do you have the Governor call out the National Guard to move these people up and down the steps? We didn't think ahead.''

But people at Kings Point are thinking ahead now. They realize as well as anybody else that they are living longer, and that they are the ones who have to deal with it.

Honey Shapiro, who arrived from Cleveland 25 years ago, recalled how worried she was at 35, when she became a mother. ''I thought: 'How long am I going to live for this child? If I can just manage 55, maybe 60.''

So far, Honey Shapiro has made it to 85. Her husband, Mike, who owned a bowling alley in Cleveland, is 89.

One thing the Shapiros and the overwhelming majority of other Kings Point residents do not want to change is their address -- ''not until we go to heaven,'' said Don Laber, 87, who bought his condominium 22 years ago, and is caring for his wife, Edythe, 88, at home. They do not want to move back North, to assisted-living facilities, or anywhere else. After all these years, home is Tuscany, Saxony, Brittany, Normandy, Monaco and Isle of Capri, as their unassuming neighborhoods of condominiums and palm trees are called.

''They didn't retire, in the sense of withdrawing from life,'' said Donna Cohen, a professor of aging and mental health at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, who is familiar with Kings Point. ''They formed a community. And they still have this fierce involvement with their community, and with their own aging.''

To that end, ramps have been built along the swimming pools, and at the theater. A shuttle bus transports residents, many of whom have had to stop driving, throughout Kings Point, and to hospitals and shopping malls. A physical therapist is on duty in the fitness center. Mike Shapiro has put in grab bars over bathtubs all over Kings Point.

Correction: March 25, 1998, Wednesday A picture caption on Monday about problems faced by the most elderly at retirement communities misidentifed a couple who moved 25 years ago to the Kings Point community in Delray Beach, Fla. They were Honey and Mike Shapiro, not Herman and Annette Adelson.